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Capt. Calum Ramm at the Antarctica Logistics and Expedition base camp on Union Glacier. The tents in the back were the team’s lodging.Credit Callum Ramm

Calum Ramm, a captain in the Marine Corps, has run many marathons in his day, but last week he set out on a far bigger challenge: running seven marathons on seven continents in just seven days as part of the World Marathon Challenge. Starting off deep in Antarctica on Jan. 23, he went on to complete marathons in Chile, Miami, Madrid, Morocco and Dubai before the finale in Sydney, Australia, on Friday. Only 15 athletes took part; those who finished ran 183.4 miles through snow, mountains, tropical heat and city streets.

Captain Ramm, from Lansing, Mich., is running to raise money for a charity, the Semper Fi Fund. and is a member of the official Marine Corps running team. Here are some of his thoughts about his experience:

Running in Antarctica was actually a lot easier than I thought. It was a four-lap course, and if I closed my eyes it was almost as if I was running in Michigan during a long winter in my high school days. I only had a base layer and jacket on, plus the normal hat / gloves / balaclava, and still overheated at times. Because the sky was the same hue as the snow, it was difficult to see anything more than white — and beyond it, the outline of mountains. A thin slice of blue sky off the horizon was the only thing that kept me from losing all orientation.

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Captain Ramm finishing the marathon in Punta Arenas, Chile, with a time of 3:13:18. This was taken less than 24 hours after he had run the marathon in Antarctica, finishing with a time of 3:31:43.Credit Richard Donovan/World Marathon Challenge

Chile was way easier, but the wind was brutal. Almost had me moving backwards at some points. I went out really slow, but dropped some serious splits on the last eight miles. Felt really good upon finishing, almost better than Antarctica. The footing was obviously better so that helped.

In Dubai I hit my wall. I thought I may not finish, at least not running. Pounding out so many miles on pavement had beat my feet up pretty bad and I had some serious shin splints — so bad that my whole leg started to swell. I could hardly put weight on it before the race started. By mile eight I was hurting pretty bad. At that point, I decided to shed my sneakers and run barefoot, hoping to reduce the swelling and open up the blood flow. I normally do one training run a week barefoot in grass, and that came in handy at this moment. I crossed the line in under four hours, which was a huge relief. But my race in Australia felt in jeopardy.

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Captain Ramm running barefoot in Dubai.Credit Courtesy of Calum Ramm

I knew I had to run Sydney in shoes because it was 13 laps on brick. Plus it was at night and along the beach — so who knew what I might step on. Walking to the start line, the wind was out of control. Not ideal conditions for a bummed leg. But like I had done in Dubai and Morocco, I thought about all the individuals cheering me on and knew I had to just gut it out. I linked up with the other Marine and we pushed through a mile at a time to finish in 3:38 for the final race.

It was bittersweet crossing that line. I was happy I didn’t have to wake up and throw the running shoes back on. But this incredible life experience was coming to a close. Running has always been so much more than just a hobby for me. It has been a venue to vent my frustrations, clear my head and help sort out life’s challenges. And in this event, the many, many miles spent with nothing but the pavement and my thoughts meant something more: a chance to help troops and veterans in need. Thanks for the support.

David Nelson in Marine Corps officer candidates' school in Quantico, Va., in August 1966.Credit U.S. Marine Corps

The first Democratic presidential debate once again raised the issue of military service during the Vietnam War. Senator Bernie Sanders was asked how he could be commander-in-chief, given that he applied for conscientious objector status during that war. (Though his application was rejected he was not drafted and did not serve.)

But while Mr. Sanders’s college-age pacifism — his office says he is not a pacifist now — has raised questions, he is not the only candidate to avoid Vietnam: Donald Trump and a few other candidates also were old enough to serve in that war but did not, for various reasons. The one candidate who did serve in Vietnam, former Senator Jim Webb, a decorated former Marine, dropped out of the Democratic nominating race. And the only remaining veteran in the pack, Senator Lindsey Graham, who recently retired from the Air Force Reserve, was 19 when the last American troops left Vietnam.

Vietnam has always been a sort of litmus test for some voters who view a lack of military service in that war as a cause for dismay and even disdain. But should the candidates be judged so harshly?

Most of us who were old enough to have been subject to the military draft during Vietnam view questions related to the war and our draft status through our personal reactions to that war. I signed up for a Marine Corps officer training program on Oct. 21, 1965, and my thoughts after the Democratic debate have focused on my situation around that time period: What was I thinking?

As a 20-year-old growing up in Lubbock, Tex., I had few philosophical thoughts about the war. A senior in high school at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, I was keenly aware of the fear that communism might spread throughout the world, and I readily bought into the so-called domino theory that if South Vietnam fell to communist forces, other countries in the region would be next.

Although I had to register with my local draft board at age 18, I began college at Texas Tech University in the fall of 1963 with no particular plan to deal with my military obligation. Then, leading up to the 1964 presidential election, Senator Barry Goldwater made several speeches in which he recommended our country go to a volunteer military and abolish the draft. Although not a strong proponent of abolishing the draft, President Lyndon Johnson suggested a commission to study the issues involved with switching to an all-volunteer force. But by March 1965 Senator Goldwater had lost the election and President Johnson began sending more ground troops into Vietnam. At that point I knew the idea of abolishing the draft was probably a pipe dream.

At the recommendation of a buddy of mine, Lee Roy Herron, I joined a Marine Corps officer training program that did not interrupt my studies. After surviving 10 weeks of officer candidates’ school in the summer of 1966, I transferred into a Marine Corps law program. As I had hoped, my three years of active duty after law school were relatively uneventful. On the other hand, Lee Roy died heroically in battle in Vietnam in early 1969, soon after he had volunteered for the front lines with fellow Marines.

How quickly we forget the realities of military service and the draft situation that existed during Vietnam and the stark differences in individual experiences. Personally, I did not serve in Vietnam, never saw combat and received no awards for valor. It is difficult for me to judge the lack of military service by Senator Sanders or Mr. Trump or any other candidate when some of my personal military decisions were centered on achieving just what they did: avoiding setting foot in Vietnam and experiencing combat.

Although we could just treat all Vietnam-era veterans as heroes, and harshly judge all those who did not serve in that or later wars, that view is too simplistic and unfair. It is also unfair to treat all Vietnam-era veterans who never saw combat as equal in heroism to those who actually saw the fight, were killed or wounded, or taken prisoner, such as Senator John McCain. While all Vietnam-era veterans deserve to be honored for their service, the highest accolades belong to people like my friend Lee Roy.

The Vietnam era was a complicated and confusing time, and judgments of draft-age men for their decisions then should not be made hastily or harshly. Prior military service is not a requirement to be commander-in-chief, and youthful decisions made a half-century ago may not be much of an indication of the kind of leader an individual would be now.

David L. Nelson spent three years in the Marine Corps, attaining the rank of captain. He became a tax partner with Ernst & Young and represented many of the largest nonprofit organizations in Texas. He is co-author of the book “David and Lee Roy: A Vietnam Story,” published by Texas Tech University Press.

As suicide attempts go, mine was of the halfhearted variety. In fact, some might even argue that it was no attempt at all. The police arrived at my Austin home following a fight I’d had in the driveway with my friend Bill, who’s also a veteran. Bill had been called over to the house by my then girlfriend because she was worried about the way I was acting.

I was wired on a cocktail of Adderall and Trazodone, and had a few drinks the night before as well. When the police arrived the following morning, a man and a woman, I asked the woman if her pistol was loaded.

“Of course it is. Why would you ask a thing like that?”

“Because I want you to shoot me in the head.”

To this day, I’m not sure why I said that. In retrospect I think it was less about wanting to die and more about expressing to another human being that I was in pain. But they were police officers, and a solicitation for suicide-by-cop, however unconvincing, was something they took very seriously.

“Right,” the male officer interjected. “We’re gonna have to bring you to the hospital.”

A minor struggle ensued outside, to the entertainment of my neighbors who observed the scene from a comfortable distance. I learned later from Bill and my now ex-girlfriend that the police entered my home and grabbed all the pharmacy bottles they could find (which numbered in the teens) and brought them to the hospital so the emergency room staff would know what I was on. They even stuck a catheter up my urethra.

They held me in observation for a day and a half, until I could get a friend to pick me up and drive me to the Austin Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic to speak to a mental health specialist. She wanted me to come in every week through the summer, but I told her I had plans to study abroad in France, so she made me promise to check back in when I returned or she would have me brought in. I came for a follow-up at the end of the summer, just because I didn’t want the police to come back to my house. I had no interest in engaging with the V.A. mental health specialists. They were way too quick to prescribe medication, and drugs were something I was trying to get away from.

In Afghanistan, I served as a Navy corpsman (combat medic). I never fired a weapon in combat, but I did treat gunshot and fragmentation wounds. The heat, the sweat, the smell of filth, the fear and danger, the long hours on the road, the mutual distrust of the local populace, the belief that the next time we left the wire would be the time we’d get hit, the four or five instances of absolute terror spread out over a yearlong deployment – these were the things that gave me pause and caused me to desire and seek numbness.

I had also suffered an injury in a car accident a year before I got out of the Navy. The accident was caused by an adverse reaction to a sleep medication, which led me to sleepwalk to my car, get in and drive. As a result, there was no shortage of pain medications in my possession.

For a person in free fall, it’s difficult to see the bottom. Certain programs of recovery describe a “white light” experience; a moment of divine clarity in which the user finally gets it. This was not true for me. I’d tried in vain to get clean for the better part of four years following my return from Afghanistan. Eventually, the effort paid off, and I got better. There was no white light.

It requires great discipline to get sober and stay sober. But sobriety also requires community. It’s necessary to be able to say to another addict or alcoholic, “I have this problem, too; I’m like you. If I can beat this, you can beat this.”

Veterans with drinking and drug problems experience an additional layer of isolation. The feeling that we can’t relate to non-veteran addicts and alcoholics is pervasive among the veterans in recovery whom I know personally. But I’ve come to learn that addiction is indiscriminate, and we have more in common with civilian addicts than we’re perhaps inclined to believe.

We can’t talk sensibly about veteran suicide without first talking seriously about veteran addiction. Drug and alcohol abuse are major indicators of suicide. This is especially true in the veterans community. There’s no doubt that we’re facing a mental health crisis. Our mental health professionals in the V.A. and in the civilian world have a tendency to over prescribe mood stabilizers, tranquilizers and anti-depressants. These drugs all have legitimate uses, and many patients absolutely need them. But if our focus is on using drugs to treat post-traumatic stress disorder or other combat related problems, we might, in fact, be making things worse. It’s possible that I’m wrong; I speak entirely from my own experience. But for me, I could not come down off the ledge until the drugs and alcohol were off the table.

Brandon Caro is the author of the debut novel, Old Silk Road (Post Hill Press, Oct. 13, 2015). He was a Navy corpsman (combat medic) and adviser to the Afghan National Army in Afghanistan from 2006-7. He holds a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Texas State University, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in fiction writing from The New School in New York City.

Once a year the streets of Philadelphia overflow with Marines, both active duty and veterans, celebrating the Marine Corps’ birthday on Nov. 10th. And it was in the “City of Brotherly Love” that I met a fellow Marine infantry veteran, Patrick Maxwell, last fall. We didn’t speak with each other much, but he knew my wars were over. What I didn’t know was that his weren’t.

Patrick didn’t share his plans with me then, but it wasn’t long before he contacted me from a village near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. He’d just come back from patrol with the Kurdish peshmerga forces. Patrick, honorably discharged in 2011, had returned to fight alongside the Kurds against the self-proclaimed Islamic State just weeks after our conversation. Not as a Marine, but as a civilian volunteer.

The full story of Patrick’s journey is told here. But his story began long before he traveled to Iraq to fight a second time.

In 2006, Patrick deployed to Iraq’s deadliest province, Anbar, in the south. But he never fired his weapon and I could understand his disappointment. I had spent the first months of my deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan anxious and saddened because I hadn’t pulled my trigger – the very thing Marines are trained to do. So I knew what he meant when he said he “felt robbed.” And so I understood why he went to fight alongside the peshmerga.

Even though I carry the weight of the lives I’ve stolen, some of them innocent, I was jealous of him and it upsets me that I don’t fully understand why. A part of me wanted to fight beside him. The other half despises the very thought. My desire for war is something I believe I will always struggle with even though my longing for peace is much stronger.

The first time I killed someone I was not under fire. A scrawny man with a Kalashnikov lurked toward our position in Falluja, Iraq. I watched as he fell to the ground with one slow, steady press of my rifle’s trigger. At first, all I felt was recoil. But I kept looking back. I couldn’t believe I had killed a man. And I did so with a smile. Because he could have killed one of us.

When my battalion fought in the siege of Falluja in 2004, the images of the World Trade Centers and Pentagon burning that drove me to enlist were no longer on my mind. The American lives lost on the fourth hijacked plane, Flight 93, weren’t what compelled me to squeeze my trigger. For me, combat had nothing to do with America or Old Glory. All aspects of my wars forged a brotherhood of Marines that cannot be replicated; an impenetrable circle of riflemen fighting to live, killing for each other. Perhaps I have been missing that.

Yet when you live life knowing that you’ve killed someone, it is scary. When I reflect on what it took for me to end a person’s life, I cannot recreate my mindset. To spill blood and end a life, I forced myself to rationalize that another human should die. And power over life is addicting. Very addicting. You miss it. You daydream about it. Nothing is more petrifying than being aggressively hunted by another human. And there is nothing more exhilarating than when you kill them first.

There is another motivation that drives veterans of the Iraq war to want to return to the fight there: Seeing Islamic State celebrate victory in the villages where our friends bled or died fighting the insurgency. It makes many of us wonder if our war was for nothing, that perhaps we failed.

So that is the jumble of emotions I felt when I heard Patrick’s story, and that I’m guessing other veterans of the Iraq war feel as they watch the battle against the Islamic State rage on. We know that there is nothing easy about killing. We know the hardships and heartbreaks, the guilt and pain of combat. And yet, we think of going back.

Thomas James Brennan is a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He was a sergeant in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. He was awarded a Purple Heart and is the recipient of a 2013 Dart Center honorable mention and the 2014 American Legion Fourth Estate Award. Follow him on Twitter: @thomasjbrennan

This week, the trial of the man accused of killing Chris Kyle opens in a Texas courtroom, even as the Clint Eastwood film based on Mr. Kyle’s life, “American Sniper,” is playing in a theater three miles away. Much as Mr. Kyle’s death shocked the nation, the film has generated fierce debate nationally over the meaning of his life and his death, and the Iraq war itself. To some, Mr. Kyle represents all that was right with the American-led invasion, to others, all that was wrong. Yet to many veterans, his story offers a chance to discuss and debate a remarkable array of complex and personal questions: the mix of motivations that lead people to sign up in the military, the riot of emotions troops feel when they kill or witness death, the struggle to reengage with civilian society upon coming home. A number of people have sent At War essays about how they viewed the film, including the piece below by a former Marine. What do you think? Send us your thoughts: atwar@nytimes.com.

We arrived at the mall and made our way to the massive IMAX theater where we found all but the first few rows completely full. “At least it’ll be immersive,” my wife said with a look of optimism as we took our seats. “Oh great,” I thought to myself, “an immersive experience of the Iraq war, this ought to be good for me.”

While reading “American Sniper” last year, I saw in Chris Kyle a man who had made himself vulnerable in his struggle to become human again while recounting the events that led him to become America’s most deadly sniper. Now with the movie, I thought that perhaps its six Oscar nominations were an effort by the Academy to say, “This subject is important and we should be taking it seriously.” But it also occurred to me that the nominations were just a figurative pat on their own backs for “serving those who served.”

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Douglas W. Jackson in Iraq in 2007, where he served as a rifleman in the Marines.Credit Courtesy of Douglas W. Jackson

I was reminded of “The Hurt Locker,” which had the movie industry convinced that they’d nailed it. “It seemed so realistic,” I can remember some people telling me. Give me a break. And then there was “Zero Dark Thirty” (also based on a Navy SEAL memoir). It, too, received wide critical acclaim with several Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Perhaps for some audiences it was an entertaining, climactic moment seeing Osama Bin Laden killed on screen. But I couldn’t help but think of a much more pressing narrative: the nation’s involvement in Afghanistan. I mean, why not show any one of the countless Army units living in the mountains for 12 months at a time, being attacked daily and barely making it out alive?

So with tempered expectations, I watched “American Sniper,” thinking, “Maybe this is Hollywood doing the best it can with limited understanding and budget.” But I started to reach my limit, my list of grievances adding up: gaping entrance wounds and digital blood, poor weapon handling, inaccurate military lingo, blinding muzzle flashes at night with suppressors on the end of M-4 carbines.

Then came a surprise: The scenes of Mr. Kyle returning from war. Initially these moments seemed fairly normal — until I realized that this was a calculated attempt to show how not normal it is to come home with a higher state of vigilance, sense of urgency and suspicion of others, all hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder. “That,” I thought, “I can relate to.” Multiple firefights and engagements with the enemy continued to play out, some more accurate than others. But as the film drew to a close, I thought, “They may actually get me after all.”

When Hollywood stepped aside and the story that inspired the film, Mr. Kyle’s death — that was the moment I finally felt overwhelmed. My jaw began to tighten, my eyes fixed on the screen and I dreaded the wave of emotions I knew would come next. When the actual footage of his funeral motorcade played out, with pictures of him and his family and simple white on black text that read, “killed while helping a fellow veteran,” only then did I feel I was finally introduced to the real Chris Kyle.

One of the less discussed messages of the film is how the motivation for joining the military is rarely the motivation for staying in, going back to war or doing the actual fighting. Mr. Kyle signed up in response to the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Africa, as many from my generation joined in response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. But by the time I arrived in Iraq in 2007, “victory” had already been declared. I wasn’t there to rid Iraq of Saddam or prevent another 9/11. I was there to answer a question: “Can I endure the most difficult thing a man can face?” I was there for the war experience. Though it may seem noble to fight for one’s country and family, those weren’t my reasons for going to Iraq. So no one is in my debt, no one owes me anything.

But we do owe it to ourselves to understand the wars we have waged and those who have fought them.

We cannot simply thank the troops and then encourage them to go on with their lives. And we veterans do not have the luxury of remaining silent about our experiences. Everyone admires the “Greatest Generation” for their humility and how unlikely they are to talk about their war memories. But there is no shortage of awareness when a country experiences total war, when sugar is rationed and tens of thousands of men are lost in a single day of fighting. Iraq was so incredibly different. During the past decade of war, less than 1 percent of the American population served in the military at any given time, compared with more than 12 percent during World War II.

My guess is that many veterans will look past the inaccuracies of “American Sniper” because, quite frankly, it’s the best thing we’ve got. Cobra attack helicopters flying during a sandstorm, satellite phone calls home during sandstorms and firefights. I don’t think so. Maybe in Hollywood but not in Iraq. The truth is, we can do so much better than this. But the film could play an important role in reminding us of how unresolved this whole chapter of our history really is. We know Iraq had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, and that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Add to that the recent news of the Islamic State now controlling large parts of Iraq and you have got a generation of veterans who bear an incredibly unique burden.

Yet there’s been a lack of meaningful conversation about the Iraq war in general, and “American Sniper” in particular. Either you loved the film, and so are viewed as a war monger by its critics; or you are a critic of the film and branded unpatriotic by its supporters. We would do well to begin separating these debates and recognizing the difference between those who tell war stories on screen and those who were actually there. And even more, remembering that those who send the country to war are often disconnected from the ones who end up fighting. Unfortunately, these conflicts have exhausted or killed some of those most qualified to speak about the costs of war. What hope do we have if we do not seek to engage with those who remain?
Douglas W. Jackson served four years as a rifleman in the Marines, and was deployed to Iraq during the surge of 2007. He is a recent film school graduate based in Florida. See more of his work at jacksondwj.com

Last year, my co-worker Emma called to let me know she was driving away from Walter Reed for the very last time. She had just resigned. She thought she would feel sadness or have pangs of remorse. But instead she had just felt relieved. It was over.

Emma and I worked together as physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and then later its reincarnation, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, for nine years.

When we were first hired in 2005, Walter Reed was so busy with incoming casualties there was a rumor that they would erect M*A*S*H tents on the front lawn of the hospital to handle the overflow. That never happened. Instead, when the wards tasked with treating the wounded filled up, the new incoming soldiers (mostly men) went to Ward 67 – the gynecology unit.

In the amputee section, where Emma and I worked, we could tell you exactly how things were going for our ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the troop surges happened in 2007 and 2009, there were so many new amputees coming in that, in one week, I saw three of my co-workers cry. But the wounded kept coming. And somehow, by 2011, we were treating an average of 150 multi-limb amputees a day.

Emma confessed on the phone that she hadn’t felt right for months and had gone to her doctor. She said that after the doctor left the room, she read her chart. She knew she wasn’t super healthy, but it was altogether different to read in black and white that she didn’t exercise, drank frequently and had a stressful job.

I was only half listening, because I had the phone balanced between my shoulder and ear as I tried to pry the cap off a bottle of beer. Walter Reed hadn’t been that healthy for me, either.

You would think that in the amputee clinic you would get used to seeing amputations, but there was always something new. In the beginning, below knee amputations and below elbow amputations were the norm. But as the wars progressed and the bombs and terrain got deadlier, we saw amputations above the knee and above the elbow. And later amputations at the groin. Those progressed to include partial pelvic amputations.

As the amputations moved up the body one night I had a dream that we saw our first body amputee: a patient whose torso and neck had been neatly severed at the head.

How did my co-workers in my dream react when that single head came in? Like we always did: we cheered for him. And we said what we always said, “Look at you! Look how great you are doing!”

The young soldier who was now just a head smiled and agreed with us, relief visibly flooding his face. “I am doing O.K.,” he said, grateful to hear from somebody, anybody, that he was all right.

That’s how it was in our clinic. No matter how badly you were hurt we always thought you were doing great.

In 2009 our first surviving quadruple amputee was pushed into our rehab gym. It was the 100th anniversary of the hospital and outside on the front lawn a big party was going on. As our new patient entered, my co-workers leapt to their feet and let out a uniform “whoop!” As we clapped and cheered, our new patient waved the short stump of his right arm and flashed the room a brave grin.

“He is going to be an ambulator,” my supervisor said at that moment. Because in our clinic you were always going to walk again, no matter the wound.

You would think that working in a clinic that saw so much destruction would be depressing, but life in our clinic was always happy and, above all, funny. The patients wore T-shirts with slogans like “I had a Blast in Afghanistan” and “Marine – Some Assembly Required.” And they made fun of each other for having “paper cuts” instead of amputations.

Scattered among the patients were staff members who would animatedly discuss the latest infomercial we had seen on late night T.V. – prompting one of my colleagues to actually order a powder blue Snuggie (a blanket with sleeves) to wear to work.

When a patient had a birthday, he or she would proudly wear the Snuggie and a special birthday-cake-shaped hat while we stood around their wheelchair and sang loudly, and cheered (of course). We’d present a birthday cake – even though you weren’t supposed to have food in the physical therapy clinic. And then everyone would eat a slice of gooey cake. An hour later, that same patient would receive another birthday cake across the gym in occupational therapy.

Every day we brought in bewildered new amputees to join our playground — on big hospital chairs that you could flatten out and roll like an operating room stretcher. We’d tie their IV poles to the back of the chair and hang their wound vacuum machines, nerve blocks, catheter bags and various drains off the armrests, and then haphazardly push them down the long corridors to the rehab gym. Their family members would trail behind us, mute with shock.

To fill in the silence of the voyage we would prattle happily along, pointing out all the great places the young veteran could visit in the hospital: the DFAC (dining facility), the barber shop, the PX (military store) — once he or she was well enough to get into a wheelchair. The highlight of our “tour” was passionately describing the weekly cafeteria specials to our captive and stunned audience.

But before an eyebrow could be raised, the tour was interrupted with a sharp warning: “Bump!” And the patient would brace him or herself for the incredible jolt of pain as their stretcher rolled over the smallest crack in the floor. And we, the staff, did our best to buffer it for them.
Adele Levine worked as a physical therapist at Walter Reed from 2005 until 2014, and is now in private practice in Silver Spring, Md. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Washingtonian and Psychology Today, and she is the author of “Run, Don’t Walk: The Curious and Chaotic Life of a Physical Therapist Inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center.” Follow her on Twitter: @PTAdele.

No millennial worth his iPhone remembers life before social media. While previous generations’ warfighters wrote letters or phoned home over spotty connections, Marines today can post on Instagram photos of themselves sitting atop cans of ammunition. In 2010, the photojournalist Teru Kuwayama and his collaborators embedded in Afghanistan to start a Facebook page for the First Battalion, Eighth Marines to communicate with loved ones. Far from resulting in just another live-stream of minutiae, their Basetrack project became a way for deployed troops to maintain relationships with their families. The resulting trove of photos and videos provide ample fodder for “Basetrack Live” — the onstage story of one corporal’s deployment and homecoming, and the effects on his family.

For both the battalion and a nation’s artists, self-reflection occurred stunningly quickly through the use of social media. Anne Hamburger, executive producer of En Garde Arts, the company behind “Basetrack Live,” said she felt it was important to document the human side of going to war, without sensationalizing the experience.

“The issues are so complex” when an ordinary person deploys, Ms. Hamburger said. Her biggest challenge for the production, which is showing at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and will be going on a national tour, was paring down the “incredible wealth of material,” she said.

Ms. Hamburger reached out through Facebook, gathering more than 100 respondents and conducting three dozen interviews to cull images and video for the project. Every word in “Basetrack Live” is taken from interviews with Marines or members of their families.

This citizen journalism captures the truth of troops’ feelings during deployment, including graffiti about pornography, and profane, funny rules for standing watch and cleaning toilets. The images chosen for the production reflect the Marines’ brotherhood, including an impressive assortment of tattoos. Because of the authentic, emotion-rich material, the Marines are painted neither as heroes nor victims.

The plot delves into the relationship between Cpl. A. J. Czubai and his wife, Melissa. Corporal Czubai is played by Tyler La Marr, a former Marine Corps sergeant and the founder of the Society of Artistic Veterans. Mr. La Marr is quick to point out that his experiences as a signals intelligence analyst in Iraq were distinctly different from Corporal Czubai’s infantry deployments to Afghanistan.

Initially, Mr. La Marr was worried that Corporal Czubai would be angry “because a pogue is telling his story!” he said in an interview, referring to military slang for “a person other than grunt,” or infantryman. But talking with Corporal Czubai helped, and the actor acknowledged that his boot camp training, with its ethos of “every Marine a rifleman,” gave him a head start on the role.

Melissa Czubai, played by Ashley Bloom, wrestles with a lack of control over situations engineered by the Marine Corps, including A. J.’s inability to be present for the birth of their daughter because of his predeployment training. “Basetrack Live” also includes the perspectives of other wives and girlfriends, and that of one Marine’s mother, to illustrate the war’s toll on families.

The web of relationships also highlights the desire of civilians to hear from Marines in close-to-real-time, bringing to light the space between deployed and home environments, and the nuanced human drama that it spans. Social media’s rapid communications can be a mixed blessing, as worries on the home front can be transmitted to deployed troops, and electrons can convey flaring tempers in both directions. Of greatest concern were erroneous reports of casualties on Facebook, which only served to accelerate the rumor mill among wives and girlfriends. In Corporal Czubai’s case, his wife learned of his best friend’s death before he did, even though he was in a neighboring company in Afghanistan.

The speed of modern life, reflected in social media, can also be jarring to nerves accustomed to a contained, mission-focused environment. After being wounded in a firefight, Corporal Czubai is sent back to the United States, while his comrades carry on in Afghanistan. This loss of his unit’s camaraderie disorients him. Overwhelmed by paranoia and guilt, he drinks, buys an array of weapons, threatens suicide and struggles with a strained marriage. He eventually accepts counseling from the Department of Veterans Affairs, but the play avoids a saccharine ending.

Now out of the Marine Corps and studying for a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, Corporal Czubai has seen several performances of “BaseTrack Live” and found the adaptation of his story “captivating.”

Ms. Hamburger said that she intended for the show to walk a fine line: conveying emotion without being overly sentimental about the participants’ experiences. The music — original compositions by Edward Bilous, Michelle DiBucci and Greg Kalember — blends a variety of styles: the rush of initial deployment to Afghanistan mixes powerful hip-hop with tribal tunes, while the disorientation of combat is illustrated by crashing rock and bright lights.

Using authentic videos and images, “Basetrack Live” offers a realistic perspective on relationships when one partner has gone to war, and how, after the long road home, social media can be a useful tool to build a sense of community. The wives and girlfriends of those serving in the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, who found each other via the project’s Facebook page, offered one another support, including tactics for waking sleeping Marines with hair-trigger reactions. And many of the Marines, themselves, stayed in touch with one another long after returning home, and were trading bear hugs at Tuesday night’s performance.

In future wars, the speed of communication will only get faster. Short of hologramming into combat, service members’ loved ones cannot get much closer than connecting daily via social media. Emotionally, this can blur the lines between battlefield and home front. “Basetrack Live” ably captures this juxtaposition and its aftermath, affording viewers a fresh look at war’s realities and at the challenges of coming home.
“Basetrack Live” was adapted by Jason Grote in collaboration with Seth Bockley and Anne Hamburger. It is playing at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, (651 Fulton St, Brooklyn) through Saturday.

Teresa Fazio was a Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2006 and deployed to Iraq. She lives and works in New York, and is writing a memoir about a relationship during deployment.

Marines of the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment responded to enemy contact in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004.Credit Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan

On Nov. 6, 2004, NATO forces launched an assault on Falluja, a city north of Baghdad that had become a magnet for Sunni insurgent forces. Thomas Brennan, then a 19-year-old Marine Corps lance corporal, was one of the infantrymen with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment who would participate in the attack. The battalion suffered numerous casualties in the battle, one of the bloodiest for American forces since Vietnam. Now a journalism student, Mr. Brennan recalls the battle with the help of some of the Marines and sailors he fought beside.

Grains of sand floated through motionless air as beams of light crept through sandbagged windows. Young men sat mesmerized by the words echoing from walls scarred by years of war.

Through cigarette smoke and desert confetti, Doug Bahrns, who was then a Marine second Lieutenant, exuded confidence and trepidation as he explained over two hours the details of our mission and what should happen when — not if — we were wounded. He paused often, gazing into the darkness above our heads. He knew he wouldn’t bring us all home.

Now a major assigned to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Major Bahrns recalled recently the weight he felt leading Marines “into such a large-scale fight where it was inevitable someone was going to get killed.”

“Nov. 10, 2004, is one of the most significant days of my life, changing not only my life, but other’s lives,” Major Bahrns said. “It put into perspective life, death and the brotherhood within military service. That was the first day, alongside my fellow Marines, that I truly felt I’d cemented my place among them.”

Ten years ago, roughly 13,500 American, British and Iraqi forces attacked Falluja, Iraq, where roughly 4,000 insurgents fought from trenches, tunnels and houses, using improvised explosive devices, rifles, rockets and machine guns. During the 46-day battle, roughly 2,000 insurgents were killed and 1,500 captured. By Dec. 23, 107 members of coalition forces had died and 613 were wounded. Alongside Lieutenant Bahrns, in Alpha Company, First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, 17 died and 102 were wounded. It was the heaviest urban combat since the 1968 Battle of Hue City during the Vietnam War.

Before Lieutenant Bahrns’s first sunset in Falluja, he screamed for a corpsman to save his good friend, First Lt. Daniel T. Malcolm. Lieutenant Malcolm loved to study military tactics as much as he loved playing chess, which to him was yet another way he could train his mind to defeat an opponent. If life were a brilliancy — a deeply strategic chess match — he made his a brevity, which is winning a chess game in 25 moves — his age when he was killed in action.

I regret playing chess with Lieutenant Malcolm only once. After four months of convoys as his driver, I struggle now that I didn’t allow myself to hurt when he died. I was never lucky enough to befriend the man I admired most.

Sgt. Billy Leo is everything I imagine a Bronx native to be – crude and opinionated with a hair trigger, once tearing my “Yankees Suck” T-shirt from my body. I can’t count how many times he pointed out my mistakes, but I cherish the times he gave me his approval.

“Falluja got the better of me once I came home. I really missed it even though it sucked,” said Mr. Leo, a 37-year-old New York City firefighter. “There isn’t one day where I don’t think about that battle.”

“It was a lot of adrenaline,” he added. “Nothing will ever give you that feeling again.”

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The helmet of a Marine from the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, bears the names of brethren killed in action during the battle of Falluja.Credit Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan

Mike Ergo, then a corporal, admired Sergeant Leo’s leadership and feared wearing Red Sox attire. November, for Mr. Ergo, is no longer a month he avoids. His daughter Adeline was born on Nov. 4, 2010, and his career providing peer support to other veterans led him to pursue a master’s degree in clinical social work.

Working as a counselor at the Department of Veterans Affairs Vet Center in Concord, Calif., has helped him “come home.” Battling guilt, loss and grief for years, Mr. Ergo credits his career with helping him overcome living with the loss of life, both American and Iraqi.

“I’d do it all again, even if I knew I wouldn’t agree with the political reasons or if I knew all of the fighting wouldn’t bring peace to the region,” said Mr. Ergo, 31. “The level of love and commitment we have for our fellow Marines means that you’ll go through hell with them not wanting to trade places with anyone.”

Fighting alongside us in First Platoon was Staff Sgt. Adam Banotai. In his squad of 17, he watched 11 Marines become casualties. His platoon earned 37 Purple Heart medals and five awards for valor.

“It petrifies me that I made a decision that was based off of my feelings and not good tactical judgment,” said Mr. Banotai. “None of what my guys say makes me stop thinking I could have pushed them harder, saved them from shedding so much blood. Those men are my heroes.”

Since Nov. 26, 2004, Reinaldo Aponte, then a petty officer third class line corpsman, has felt pained when he remembered the Marine he could not save. He was pulled away from Lance Cpl. Bradley Faircloth’s body believing he had done his best. But replaying the situation in his mind since, he still wonders: Could he have done more?

“I didn’t look at any of the Marines. I was so angry, screaming incoherently. I cried, feeling like I’d let my squad down,” said Mr. Aponte, now 31, of Milwaukee. “I was scared they wouldn’t trust me anymore. I didn’t want them to be afraid to call on me as their corpsman. I needed to remain a part of the squad. I was afraid of losing all of them because I lost Brad.”

As the chaplain for our battalion, Lt. Dennis Cox spent hours with us discussing our concerns. He tried to justify killing the enemy. He prayed for each of us. He wiped tears from our eyes. He cleaned the blood from the faces of our fallen. He too, cannot stop reliving our battle.

He is now a commander in the Chaplain Corps at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. “When they die, a part of you goes with them,” Commander Cox said. “We smell something, we see something, we hear something and it triggers something we were doing 10 years ago.”

Over the years, Commander Cox has stayed in touch with the families of our fallen. Just like us, he considers them family. For him, it’s a painful reminder of how much they lost.

Kathleen Faircloth knew what to expect. Her son, Bradley, was wounded twice before the second battle of Falluja. Marines standing in their dress uniforms at her front door meant only one thing. For 10 years, she hasn’t showed anger toward our platoon. Instead, she is glad we remember her son. As long as his memory is alive, she said, she will find happiness.

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Lance Cpl. Bradley Faircloth in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004.Credit Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan

“I lost a son, but I gained children across the country. I know that if I ever needed anything, they would do anything they could to help me,” said Ms. Faircloth, now 50, of Fairhope, Ala. “I hope they find peace in their heart, because seeing them miserable isn’t how I want to see them.”

Whether still in uniform or having moved on to a different chapter of our lives, remembering is something we can’t fail to do. While some have a memorial in Massachusetts, Alabama or at The Citadel, some veterans of Falluja remember each of their fallen brethren through writing, by advocating for the Iraqi families we displaced, or by displaying the noble and true face of our generation.

In the last 10 years, we’ve lost sons, brothers, wives and children, struggling to maintain our own sanity and even after many failed attempts, we continue helping one another from becoming part of the suicide epidemic. Some of us, much like in Falluja, are still bounding house-to-house, searching for something we left behind and a way to evade what we brought home.

Thomas James Brennan is studying investigative journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before being medically retired in 2012, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. He is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and the recipient of a 2013 Dart Center honorable mention and the 2014 American Legion Fourth Estate Award. Follow him on Twitter: @thomasjbrennan

“You know you won a free round-trip ticket to Afghanistan?” a perpetually busy chief master sergeant asked me one warm winter evening. We were at the gym at Robins Air Force Base in Houston County, Ga., after a day spent serving on a panel of public affairs chiefs.

“You’re kidding,” I said. Weights clanked behind us. “I saw my name on a deployment list, but there was a question mark beside it.” All afternoon, my hopes had hung on that question mark.

“No question sir. You made the list. You’re going to ISAF headquarters in Kabul,” he said, referring to the United States-led international force in Afghanistan. He beamed like he was handing me a winning lotto ticket. It was January 2013. I was scheduled to deploy in 15 months.

To him, deployment amounted to the opportunity of a lifetime. At that moment, it seemed to me like some surreal theft. I’d miss another New England summer, every birthday in my immediate family and my 33rd wedding anniversary. As a 30-year Air Force Reserve veteran, I’d spent months away from home, but never deployed to a war zone. So I was a decade overdue. But while the Air Force Reserve asks for volunteers to go overseas, I had assumed they don’t involuntarily deploy 53-year-old grandfathers.

They do.

When I called my wife, Debby, that evening to tell her the news, she said, “Aren’t you a little old for that?”

I felt old. I took a walk around the gorgeous Georgia base, grateful to be away from the frigid New England winter, feeling alternately numb and angry to be “non-vol’d.” The crepe myrtles bloomed and the sun warmed my arms as the notion crept up my spine: I’m going to Afghanistan.

In the evening, after opening the Gideon Bible to the 23rd Psalm and glancing at the familiar words – “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want …” – I slept in fits until about 3 a.m., then not at all. In the dark, short, violent movies kept looping in my head. Somebody would burn another Quran and 40,000 protesters – 1 percent of Kabul’s population – would storm the gate. An Afghan would come to work and start shooting, like what happened when a colleague was killed at Kabul International Airport. Looping, like bad songs that won’t stop.

The next day, I asked the Reserve Command director, a thoughtful colonel, “What are my options?”

So I started a year of intense training holding two opposing notions in balance: “I can’t believe they’re sending me to Afghanistan,” and, “What a great opportunity.” During one week of training, I learned how to greet someone in Dari, how to kill an enemy using a chokehold and how to save a shooting victim’s life with quick-clot bandages. Ironically, the Dari greeting, “salaam alaykum,” means “peace be with you.” I read thousands of pages of material on the nuances of Afghan culture, how to spot a roadside bomb, how to evade enemy capture. There were also facts I hoped not to need: Grasshoppers, ants and worms are edible; hairy or brightly colored insects are not. I learned that Afghanistan is a “nation of minorities,” with Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks accounting for about 87 percent of the population, but none representing a majority.

Two weeks before flying overseas I attended combat training at Fort Dix, N.J. It was the hardest training I’d done, physically and mentally, since officer training school in 1984. On the first day, with Army and Marine trainers yelling above simulated explosions, we learned that the Hollywood notion of low-crawling on your elbows actually is high-crawling. In a real low-crawl, you drag your head or helmet along the ground. I can’t low-crawl for more than a few feet without stopping to gasp for air, I discovered, while hauling 70 pounds of body armor and equipment.

Our instructor warned us that on the day we conducted urban assault exercises, we would get shot with metal-capped plastic bullets.

“Only the first shot hurts,” he said.

I didn’t believe him. The night before our turn at urban assault, I stuffed my uniform pockets with padding – a spare notebook, a pair of combat gloves. But our “aggressors,” all expert marksmen, took great delight in shooting us in the few square inches they knew we couldn’t pad. At one point mid-exercise, my M-4 jammed and I stopped moving to “slap and snap” my weapon. In those two seconds, I got shot on the inside thigh, just below the protective groin cup. It stung hard, and would eventually swell up to baseball size. But my instructor was right: I got shot twice more that day and never felt either bullet.

After eight days of travel and delays – from Norfolk, Va., to Pease, N.H., to Germany, Kuwait, Qatar, and a staging base in Afghanistan – I arrived at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, wearing my helmet and heavy body armor, dragging more than 300 pounds of gear. I joined the battle rhythm of working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, at the Media Operations Center as chief of future operations. In my first two months in-country, I lost 15 pounds without trying.

At Camp ISAF, beauty and ugliness mingled. Around the perimeter stood a beige, prisonlike concrete blast T-wall, meant to save us from rocket attacks. Razor wire surrounded various compounds within the main camp. Gray dust settled on everything. Across from the ISAF commander’s building was the pristine Destille Garden, with green grass, cozy pavilions and a spacious brick fire pit. At the entrance, a waterfall trickled down a series of bowls. Next door sat three faded porta-potties and seven rusty storage containers.

In my job, the mundane and the noble mingled. For hours each week, I served as a “PowerPoint Ranger,” working into the night to align information in boxes and shade one section of a briefing medium green instead of light green on a slide that might flash on a screen for 10 seconds in a crowded conference room. Other times, I helped plan events that were reported globally.

On June 25, sweating under the Afghan sun, while two Black Hawk helicopters buzzed overhead, I met Afghan Brig. Gen. Jamila Bayaz, Kabul’s first female police chief. She’d been the target of multiple death threats since she started on the Kabul police force 30 years ago, simply because she’s a woman. In her gray uniform and black hijab, she spoke with grace and confidence about bringing more women onto the force for the good of Afghanistan, and afterward I felt like I’d witnessed a brief moment of something noble.

The less-spotlighted people I met here provided another window into courage: One Afghan woman who worked on the ISAF compound to support her family said, “The Taliban would kill me if they knew I worked here.” She was just one of a parade of Afghan soldiers and civilians who have taken the brunt of the violence in this long war.

The beauty and nobility often seem alloyed with something more dangerous. After a news conference, as I was escorting reporters and cameramen to the gate, I asked one reporter if she felt safe living in Kabul. “Not lately, after the bombing,” she said. “We used to throw parties every week, but now we don’t meet together in the evenings, except when we have to attend events for work.” She was referring to an incident on Jan. 17, when a suicide bomber entered the Taverna du Liban, a Lebanese restaurant popular with Western journalists. After the explosion, two gunmen rushed in and fired on diners. Twenty-one people died. In another scare, on July 3, insurgents launched two rockets that exploded at Kabul International Airport, near the ISAF compound. No one was injured, but they caused millions of dollars in damage.

On July 18, 12 of us went from ISAF to a charitable organization in west Kabul to drop off 800 pounds of clothes, school supplies and even some purple lollipops. I was apprehensive. The day before, insurgents had attacked a compound near the airport for nearly five hours. But it ended up being my favorite day in Afghanistan. Then, on Aug. 5, an insider attack at Camp Qargha in Kabul killed Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, the highest ranking American to die in the war, and injured 15 others, including a friend – a tall bodybuilder who seemed indestructible. I can’t help thinking that for all the briefings and PowerPoint slides I prepared, my best contributions were dropping off school supplies and comforting some of the Camp Qargha survivors.

This mingling of high and low seems as old as war. During my going-away party, I quoted Shakespeare’s lines from “Henry V.” When Henry’s army is at its worst, sick and rain-soaked, he tells the French messenger, Mountjoy, “We would not seek a battle, as we are; Nor as we are, we say, we shall not shun it.” I don’t think I’d trust someone who sought out war without questioning why. So I walked around Camp ISAF, looking for the noble amid the gray dust and green gardens, as competing notions – “I can’t believe they sent me here,” and, “What a great opportunity” – staged their own battle.

A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, James Gleason Bishop served in Afghanistan as a public affairs officer at headquarters, International Security Assistance Force from April to August 2014. He’s completing a memoir on his time in Afghanistan. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of NATO, the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force or the United States government.

At Contingency Operating Base Speicher, I was a lieutenant working in the operations department for an explosive ordnance disposal battalion. We were responsible for the entire northern sector of the country, about 50,000 square kilometers (or roughly 19,300 square miles) of ground touching the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian borders.

The information came to me in an otherwise benign email, alongside the dozens of field reports that hit my inbox every hour. After just a couple of days as the new guy on the team, the reports showing the aftermath of vehicles and soldiers torn apart by explosives started feeling routine. I’d been expecting them.

But this one showed something I didn’t see coming: M110 shells, which are American-designed 155-millimeter artillery projectiles. These had tested positive for sulfur mustard, a blister agent.

“Chem rounds.”

I looked away from my screen, and not 10 feet away from me was Chuck, an Army E.O.D. technician who’d already served tours in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He was the kind of noncommissioned officer every lieutenant hopes for: a smart, talented young soldier who trained you up and made you better. I was already relying on Chuck for everything.

Here, I turned to him in disbelief.

I told him that the team had found chem M110’s and that the shells had tested positive for mustard.

He was unimpressed.

I persisted. As far as I knew, we’d just made the first “WMD find” of the war.

But it turned out there was a lot I didn’t know.

He cut right to the chase.

Chuck turned to me and peered over the eyeglasses low on his nose. He looked at me for a while without blinking.

“LT, let me let you in on something,” he said. “We find three or four of those things a week up north here. Everybody knows about them. And nobody cares.”

I was stunned. “You got to be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

As good noncommissioned officers do, Chuck got me up to speed quickly but also didn’t hesitate to give me swift reality checks when needed. This was one of those times.

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Lt. John Ismay of the Navy in a wheat field hit by BLU-97/B cluster bombs near Bartallah, Iraq, in 2007.Credit John Ismay

Like many Americans, I questioned the rationale for invasion after the United States failed to find weapons of mass destruction in 2003. But now, in February 2007, I was staring at color photos of chemical weapons taken just hours before.

Some days, we saw as many as three Americans killed and others wounded in our sector. And the majority of those casualties were caused by makeshift bombs made with high explosives. But every once in a while, one of our teams took a “chem hit” – where one of the troops was exposed to a chemical warfare agent.

Within my first month in Iraq, we had our first chemical warfare agent casualties.

One of them was Specialist Richard T. Beasley. (The New York Times is withholding the name of Specialist Beasley’s partner at that individual’s request.)

Chuck went down to check on them.

When he got back, we asked about the team and how its members were recovering. Chuck shook his head and described how the two wounded men were sitting on lawn chairs outside their trailer, and were pumped full of opiates so they could handle the pain.

Chuck said they were basically in la-la land, thanks to the drugs.

Both men were being kept in Iraq instead of being medically evacuated to surgical hospitals in Germany or the United States. We wondered if it was an attempt to keep their wounds hush-hush.

Eventually both men recovered, but they bear scars from their wounds and the mustard exposure could mean potential long-term health complications later in life.

I found out only recently that my unit had submitted them for the Purple Heart, but a higher headquarters denied the awards.

If you served in Iraq and believe you were exposed to chemical weapons or participated in operations involving them, The New York Times would like to hear from you.

John Ismay was a Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer who served in northern Iraq during the 2007 surge. He was a contributor on C. J. Chivers’s article “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons.” Follow him on Twitter.

Just before Sept. 11, 2001, my teenage brother Mike, fresh from Air Force training, pressed something small into my palm: two pin-backings stubbed on a curled shape in dusky silver. Jump wings.

“If you keep them safe, I’ll always be safe,” he said.

My brothers and I had always tried to protect each other. Chris, the younger, was calm, but Mike was rambunctious. When I was 4 and they were toddlers, I would sneak into their room past midnight to ensure they still occupied their dual cribs. I would poke a finger through the crib slats, slide up their eyelids, and check their breathing as they slept. Safe in their company, I would curl up on the floor for a minute, then pad back to my pink-swathed bed. But by elementary school, our parents had divorced, and anger ran through our thin walls.

When I was 14, our stepfather and Mike, 12, got in a fight over pajamas. Too cowardly to burst in, I stayed in bed and turned up my Walkman. Mike sobbed himself to sleep with a nosebleed that soaked his mattress. He had misbehaved, but my crime felt worse — I had let him thrash alone. As the years passed, conflicts with our stepfather prompted police cruiser lights on our street. When I finished high school, Mike’s card to me read, “…Stay another year? Please?” I should have ensured my brothers grew up strong. Instead I fled.

At 18, I paid for college with a Marine Corps R.O.T.C. scholarship; the military’s rules seemed enlightened next to the ones back home. Mike later barreled into the same Boston unit as an Air Force cadet. He tagged along on field exercises with us upperclassmen, easily completing grueling hikes and rappelling down university buildings. My senior year, the Twin Towers fell, and I knew at some point I would deploy. The following June, Mike and Chris pinned gold lieutenant bars on my shoulders.

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Teresa Fazio receiving her Marine Corps commission in 2002, with her two brothers, Chris on the left and Mike on the right. Credit Courtesy of Teresa Fazio

Two years later, on an Iraqi base, I nervously strapped myself into an androgynous Kevlar jacket. Tromping around our gravel-strewn compound, I doled out candy and phone cards while waiting for mortars to fall. We plodded through our days, trusting in grace that wherever we stepped was safe. Late at night, when the desert heat lifted, I taught my Marines martial arts. As we punched foam mats and dragged each other through the sand, I wondered how my fist would feel against my stepfather’s face, how much pressure my forearm required to choke his carotid artery. But I could not predict the techniques my sparring partners threw; I could only try to counter them. And my rage did not help me lead.

One night, I ordered my troops to repair broken cables across an exposed airfield. Mortars exploded in front of them. Riddled with anxiety, I monitored the radio, counting heads. My dog tags said I was 23 years old. I felt 80.

Meanwhile, Mike graduated from R.O.T.C. He mailed me his uniform cap on which to fasten his lieutenant’s insignia, a shiny “butterbar,” the same way he had once pinned on mine. I sent it back from Iraq, properly pinned, with two more matte-bronze lieutenant bars thrown into the envelope for good luck.

In war, officers mark their rank subtly in order to hide from snipers. In childhood, I had learned to fly under the radar. From 8,000 miles away, I still tried to coach my firebrand brother on avoiding trouble. But soon he had become a combat controller, jumping from planes and calling in airstrikes for troops on the ground. His specialized training would supersede all of my advice. The Marine in me was impressed. The sister in me was terrified.

Still, I knew where his jump wings were. I had pinned them into a nylon wallet next to a note from our late Italian grandmother. On a hospital menu, she had written, “Non dare a calci ogni piccola pietra per strada — aspetta per una piri grande.” “Do not kick every small stone on the road — wait for a large rock.” That is, pick your battles.

I picked Iraq. As I waited for my Marines to call me from that mortar-scarred airfield, I knew we were also at risk from rockets in the shower or the radio tent. Ducking prematurely was no guard against hardship. My platoon proved lucky; despite my new-lieutenant stumbles, we all lived. And however much I cared for Mike, I couldn’t completely protect him, whether from family violence, incoming rounds, or planes in a blue autumn sky. Now it was his turn to jump.

He survived his first deployment, and the next, and four more after that. He is currently serving on his seventh tour overseas. So I trust in dark, brushed metal. And I keep his jump wings safe.

Teresa Fazio spent four years as a Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2006, deploying once to Iraq. She lives and works in New York City and is writing a memoir about a deployment relationship.

The recent green on blue attack that claimed the life of Gen. Harold J. Greene, the deputy commander for the Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan, has, for good reason, caused a fury of questions in the media about these attacks and what they meant. Who are the Afghans that carry them out? Why do they seem to suddenly turn on the Americans that have been fighting with them for years and years, struggling to help Afghanistan build something from the ruins of three decades of war. The answers, it seems, are complex, but also nuanced. And the questions reminded me of the worst case of post-traumatic stress syndrome that I’ve ever seen.

He called himself Castro. He was a slight Afghan man with fine features, wide eyes half-hidden behind a chronic furrow, and black hair always swept back for how often he would sit with his head in his hands.

One of his first firefights, in 2003, was an ambush that cost two American lives. It happened in a distant valley in eastern Afghanistan, a chance encounter at dark in a place without the slightest significance to American interests before, and now significant only for the families of men killed there. All of it is a metaphor for how CIA officers often die.

The sole remaining American – we’ll call him John – charged up the mountain, trying to break the ambush at the flank. The Afghans with him tried to keep pace, but much popular mythology to the contrary, not all Afghans have evolved with genes uniquely selected for fighting and climbing steep hills. Between the valley floor and the ridge, they all dropped, from exhaustion or fire. All but one: Castro. He and John reached the top, taking fire from both sides. Shooting at the row of Taliban militants to his front, John could not turn to return fire coming at his back. Castro, close behind, saved his life.

Years later, John did not remember the story quite the same way. But distinguishing the details of one firefight out of one thousand can be hard. What was interesting was that this was the story Castro chose to tell over and over: that he was there when two Americans died, he was there when the third charged up the mountain.

The night of that firefight, Castro had a different name. This nom de guerre, an homage to Fidel, that great thorn in America’s side, he chose later — after his PTSD had become clear and he had been transferred to what amounted to an administrative job and after he was no longer in daily contact with the Americans he had long known and separated even from other Afghan fighters. He was descending into a dark place.

It was during this time, in about 2008, that he would often spend the night at the base rather than return home to his wife and daughter, and whenever possible I would sit with him for tea at the end of the day.

I would find him alone in his room, hunched over his computer, grainy bootleg VHS videos of Indian dance competitions playing on loop, mute on a little TV. We would start with small talk: the superiority of Indian television to the indescribably awful Pakistani soap operas, a few old Mullah Nasruddin jokes. But inevitably the conversation would turn. I would see it coming, watching him wring his hands as his voice grew louder, regurgitating whatever had been the message of the day on shahamat or the Al Qaeda blogs: the suppression of the brothers in Palestine, the apostates armed with American tanks, the American hypocrites that dropped the a nuclear bomb on Japan. And it always ended the same way. I hate Americans, he would say. Then, catching himself, he would add: not you. I don’t mean you or John or Brian or Patrick. You are my brothers. I love you. But I hate Americans.

The only Afghan that Castro considered a brother was also a soldier. They had come to the war together, and fought in all the same places, sipping tea and eating dinner with the same Americans for years. We’ll call him Yankee. He loved America – a country he had never seen – and never had a doubt about American intentions or the evil of America’s enemies. He was forever jovial and at ease, an inexplicable mix of Afghan stoicism and American optimism that protected him against the daily — yearly – grind of suicide bombings and firefights, of shattered bodies and of his country’s grinding misery.

At first, Castro and Yankee would spend hours together, talking and listening. But after a year or two, they drifted apart, almost pushing each other away, as if each man defined himself in reaction to the other: Yankee hopeful and resilient, Castro lost and angry.

Still, I would occasionally convince Yankee to come talk with Castro. And at first they would laugh, telling old stories the way soldiers do.

But then the conversation would turn. Castro would say that he almost did it again, something he’d almost done dozens or perhaps hundreds of times. He would describe having his 9-millimeter gun in his hand, seated alone in a room as his daughter and wife watched from the door, his wife silently weeping while his daughter looked on scared and confused. Then, just in time, his daughter would run to him, climbing into his lap, asking why he had the gun. Then the vulnerability would pass and the rage would return. The brothers in Palestine, he would rant, the apostates and the tanks, the unconventional weapons. And then Yankee would storm out, the only times I ever saw him angry.

It seemed clear then that Castro’s rage was the inevitable result of his endless firefights and bombings, his years of fighting alongside the Americans. But in retrospect, I wonder what came first; the PTSD or the radicalization. Regardless, both, I think, would have come. In the beginning, Castro, a man with what we in the west call a “strong sense of justice,” fought with the Americans because he hated Pakistan; the most recent foreign invader striving to keep Afghanistan weak. But as time passed and the war did not end it became impossible for him to believe that the Americans wanted peace. It was all so obvious, he would say during our talks. Everyone wants war in Afghanistan but the Afghans.

Time passed. Castro’s old friends continued to drift away. I moved on to other projects. John had been long gone. Yankee, the Afghan who was more American than the Americans, had been given a visa and was living in California.

It all came apart in August 2008. In trying to cut off a second wave of suicide bombers and vehicle-borne bombs attacking the base, Castro’s friend Patrick was seriously injured and evacuated, never to return to Afghanistan. He had been Castro’s last friend.

Though not physically injured, it was probably Castro who was the most grievously hurt. He was alone. The next day, having not slept, he beat on an office door, demanding to know Patrick’s condition.

A new American, unimpressed with this incoherent Afghan, dismissed him. Insulted, Castro raged back, threatening to kill him if someone did not tell him of Patrick. Within seconds Castro was seized by younger Afghan soldiers. Unceremoniously, they tossed him off the base.

When I heard the story later, I was told Castro had saved much of his salary over the years, and had set himself up in a small business in Khost Province near the Pakistani border. I never looked to see if this was true.

Yankee, in contrast — I know about him. He is an American citizen, one step closer to his dream of a commission in the United States Air Force. I’d like to think that Castro spends his days sitting in a market stall, selling juice boxes and knock-off Indian DVDs, chatting happily with customers and vendors, his daughter at his side.

Only I know that is willfully dishonest. When I remember him with his head in his hands, when I think of him away from his brothers, adrift and without a side, I wonder if it was inevitable. I wonder if it would have mattered how the war ended. I wonder if Castro, like so many others who were lost and angry, so many others with that strong sense of justice, those whose feeling and intensity eventually twisted in and degenerated into something horrible after years and years of desperate helplessness, exploded himself in some crowded market, seeking redemption and an end. Or if Castro, still above the false martyrdom of his first enemy, simply fired a bullet into his head, his daughter watching from the doorway.

Ian Allen was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps upon graduation from the University of San Diego in 1998, deploying with the 1st Battalion 6th Marines to Okinawa, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and Russia. In 2006 he left active duty and joined the C.I.A., working as a paramilitary operations officer in Afghanistan, the Middle East, East Africa and Latin America. He left the CIA in 2012 and is now a writer.

KABUL, Afghanistan – Here come the helicopters again. Blackhawks, flying out of the Kabul night, the gunner hanging out the side, scanning the city from behind the sights of an M-240B automatic rifle. The blades thunder their rhythm throughout the compound, too loud to talk over. They land quickly, spill out their passengers and a few bags, and leave. This isn’t the place to linger.

The last Blackhawk landed so close it blew open the windows and scattered papers across our office floor. I’m on the ground, at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a relatively safe NATO compound in central Kabul, along with more than 2,000 people from 48 coalition countries.

Tonight, the Macedonians are playing a serious game of soccer at a small court surrounded by a chain-link fence. On my walk around the small compound, I see Afghans, Britons, Dutch, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Swedes, Poles, Romanians, Turks, and a few whose country I can’t recognize; troops from the United States Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force; and civilians. Almost all are armed. My friend said that this place was like the Epcot Center, with guns.

I pass a white-haired lady wearing a conservative blue dress who could be described only as grandmotherly, if it weren’t for the 9-millimeter Beretta strapped to her hip. Every Sunday, I sing and play acoustic guitar at the base chapel. I’m learning from my musical betters. My tendency is to rush a song. If I don’t position the strap just right, my 9-millimeter handgun bangs against my guitar as I play. The rest of the congregation, except for the chaplain and a few civilians, is also armed.

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Lt. Col. James Bishop in Kabul.Credit TSgt. David Zheng.

Our “Battle Rhythm,” meaning the meeting schedule and work shift, is long. We work seven days a week, and 12 hours a day, or more, with two glorious exceptions: On Friday and Saturday mornings, we get to come in at noon. I average about 84 hours a week; others average more. Days blur, so it hardly matters whether today is Tuesday or Saturday. People said you would get used to working seven days a week. I haven’t. The pace does violence to the ancient rhythm of work and rest: Six days shalt thou labor, the Lord told Moses.

We live by regulation and decree. Three-minute showers. Don’t pass anything to an Afghan with your left hand, the hand used for bathroom functions. Don’t take both chef’s salad and hot entree in the chow hall (huh?). When you hear “Incoming!” on the loudspeakers, hit the floor and cover your head. General Order No. 1 prohibits the possession of alcohol or pornography, bans proselytizing and bans feeding the indigent cats for fear of rabies — although we want the cats around to catch rats, which attract poisonous snakes. That last rule, at least, is routinely ignored. Another rule: no sex, and no men in the women’s barracks (and vice versa). At least this rule is no hardship for me to follow, since Deb and I celebrate our 33rd anniversary this month.

Yet for all our rules, we are living large on this NATO compound. Troops stationed in the more rugged forward operating bases scattered around the country call this base Camp Cupcake because we have beds, warm meals, hot showers, female barbers and patches of green grass.

The nearness of death bubbles to the surface regularly. We see it in dozens of daily reports from open media and our own secret sources: “Five dead in Farah bombing,” “35 Afghan University professors abducted in Ghazni,” “Mortar blast kills two children.” We see the nearness of death at night, when the alarm sounds “Shelter in place!” and an explosion rocks the compound. At my going-away party in the headquarters building at Westover Air Reserve Base in Massachusetts, I read a letter from a 6-year-old at our church, who penned, in a child’s oversize handwriting: “I hope you have fun in Afghanistan. I hope you don’t. …” Having run out of room, he used the back of the card to finish his innocent thought: “die.”

During my first two hours in Afghanistan, while at another base waiting for a flight, we took rocket fire. Around midnight, we’d just arrived at the dirt-caked, broken-plywood “distinguished visitor transient barracks” after a trip that began five days earlier. A giant voice barked over the base loudspeaker system, “Incoming, incoming, incoming!” Then a loud boom. It sounded close. When the first rocket hit, I was talking to a lean and leathery Army sergeant major who could’ve been the model for the Marlboro man.

“Is this a drill?” I asked.

“No sir, I believe this is the real thing,” he drawled. After the first blast, I ducked low, and the sergeant major even crouched down. We’re supposed to drop to the floor immediately because explosions tend to mushroom upward. I hate to admit that I resisted lying on the floor because it was filthy. Then a second explosion sounded, as loud and near as the first.

After the booms stopped, I grabbed my heavy body armor and headed for the bunker, as required.

“You coming, sargn’t major?”

He shook his head and went outside to smoke. “This ain’t my first rodeo.”

Inside the musty concrete bunker, I chatted with a groggy, scared 18-year-old from Cleveland. After 10 minutes, “All clear” sounded across the base, and we went to grab some chow.

In my compound, there’s a thin veneer of safety, and it’s easy to stare at the snow-capped foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains and forget about the war. Now and then, we get a reminder. On May 25, I was working in my second-floor office around 3:15 p.m. when we heard an explosion. Sometimes a truck backfires or someone throws down weights in the gym, and we’ll look at each other and wonder. But this sounded close and unmistakable. I wish it didn’t sound like a movie explosion, but it did. Whoom! My window rattled, then things went silent. People sitting on the third-story porch where I eat said they saw a large white plume. We found out in scattered chunks of information from classified sources, and later open sources, that a suicide motorcyclist had rammed into a bus carrying Afghan National Army troops less than a mile from our compound. It struck me as unnerving that a motorcycle can pack that much explosive material. Two people died, and nine were wounded in the blast.

But when the dust settles from the insurgents’ rockets, at the end of the long day, what I see is an international gathering of people braving roadside bombs and dangerous checkpoints to help build a fledgling democracy. I see three basic questions driving their actions, blending the noble and mundane: Will this project help Afghanistan? Will it make me look good? When can I go home? I also see snow and soot blow across the summit of the Hindu Kush range, and I restack the papers in my office after the helicopter departs. In rare moments, I almost wish you were here to see it, too.

A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, James Gleason Bishop is serving in Afghanistan as a public affairs officer at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force. He’s also completing a memoir on hiking along the Appalachian Trail. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of NATO, the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force or the United States government.

It was dark. Iraq. The middle of the night. The height of the insurgency. The explosion shook our insides. I ran up to my friend and looked at what was left of his body. His limbs were blown off. His eyes were still open but he stared off into nothingness. He gasped and choked as his body was still trying to breathe. I did everything I could to save him, but he still died in my arms.

This is what I brought home from the war with me, and it almost killed me. Or, I should say: This, and many similar incidents like this from my deployment, is why I almost killed myself when I returned home.

I was just a boy when I joined my country’s military. Eighteen years old. I was untested and unproven and I thought that joining a Special Operations unit and fighting in a war was the only way to prove my love of country, and my self-worth. But I learned an extremely hard and valuable lesson: War is not glorious. There are no monologues. There are no curtain calls where everyone joins hands on stage and bows to the audience at the end.

It is messy. It is violent. It makes you hate your enemy, even long after the war is over. It brings out the worst in people.

It brings out the worst in you.

Or at least, so I once believed. For the last six years, I felt an honor and pride in the hardships I had faced. But I also felt a hate and mistrust for the Iraqi people I had fought, and tried to protect. And I still harbored those feelings right up until one recent morning. Right up until brunch time, when my son’s kindergarten class decided to have a “Teddy Bear Picnic.” An event that would teach me a sobering and humbling life lesson.

Photo

Gerardo Mena and his son.Credit Courtesy of Gerardo Mena

I was busy unrolling and perfectly placing my son’s Spider-Man blanket that we made from a No-Sew kit last year, when I saw them preparing their own blanket a few feet from us. Arabs. I could feel my stomach muscles clench as that initial wave of hate began crashing itself against my insides. That uncontrollable spider sense that lingered from the war. The one I couldn’t seem to turn off. The one that kept me safe, vigilant and hateful.

I seated myself on our blanket with my back to them, not wanting the image of them to spoil my day off and ruin my precious time with my son, the way they spoiled my mid-twenties.

Three bites into my bologna sandwich and I decided I didn’t want my back to them because it made me nervous. Always vigilant, I told myself. So my son and I boot-scooted around so I could place my beady, mistrustful eyes on them. Then they surprised me.

These weren’t the typical extremist types. They couldn’t be. They looked amazing. This Arab man, late twenties (still fighting age) had a short beard. One could argue an Americanized or Western-style facial hair that is popular right now in Hollywood (Ryan Gosling, anybody?). He had on a tan argyle sweater, black jeans and beige loafers. He was quite stylish, and a far cry from sporting a suicide bomber’s vest. His wife had on a colorful dress full of pink, white and brown Rorschach stripes with a matching hijab, and she radiated a warmth and beauty and kindness that I’ve never seen in an Arab (Iraqi or otherwise). And then there were their two twin daughters who were absolutely adorable in their jumpers and their dark hair done up in matching pink bows. This family looked like they were taken straight out of a magazine.

They looked more respectable and modern than my slightly-dirty-yet-still-smells-clean-enough Old Navy pullover, broken-in blue jeans, tired-looking eyes, and brown sandals with random threads hanging out of the stitching.

It was then that the two kindergarten girls called out to my son, said hi, and waved to him with matching piano-like grins. My son turned around and returned the sentiment and went back to eating his bologna sandwich.

Then, another boy two feet away with a mop full of bright red hair and a face full of freckles said hi to my boy. He, again, returned the sentiment and went back to eating his sandwich. Then, an African-American boy said hi. My boy, again, returned the sentiment. Then, my boy initiated his own greeting and said hi to an awkwardly tall Caucasian girl two blankets away. And before I knew it, my boy had greeted, or had been greeted by, all 22 kids in his class, no matter their race or religion or age. It was beautiful to watch.

The teacher called for the students to line back up to go inside. I looked over and the Arab couple had turned their backs to me.

I stood up and brushed the grass off my legs and peered over their shoulders. I saw both of them braiding their daughters’ hair, putting their pink bows back in place and then hugging their children as lovingly as I hugged my own son. Then the twins ran over and grabbed my boy by the hand and they skipped over to the lineup area together.

I realized I wasn’t some hardened ex-war hero fighting machine. I was just a racist jerk. And all it took was a lunch period with a class full of 6-year-olds to show me that America was still the greatest country in the world and that there was still hope for me to become a better man. A real man.
Gerardo Mena, a decorated veteran of the war in Iraq, spent six years with the Reconnaissance Marines. He is the author of the war poetry collection, “The Shape of Our Faces No Longer Matters.” For more information go to www.gerardomena.com

How does it feel when the country for which you’ve lost youth, relationships and health wants to get rid of you? It feels like betrayal. If the Army is our family, then this is divorce.

The week of June 22 was a hard one for Army captains. After announcing in early December that about 20 percent of captains commissioned in 2006, 2007 and 2008 would receive pink slips this spring, the cuts were finally handed down starting June 23. Those who were chosen for the ax (or, as Army officials more tactfully call it, separation) were given the bad news in a meeting with a senior officer. Everyone else waited nervously to see whether they would be next.

The Army isn’t the only service enduring reductions. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have announced “force shaping,” too. While officers face separation boards or are denied promotions — and, therefore, required to exit — even more enlisted service members are being downsized. Instead of being asked to leave after being reviewed, however, they are simply not permitted to re-enlist, an action that had been all but guaranteed when the wars were raging. While the Army stands at about 520,000 soldiers today, the Pentagon’s 2015 budget proposal calls for it to shrink by almost 60,000 by 2017.

About 1,100 Army captains in June heard “Thank you for your service. You have until April 1 to exit the Army.” About 500 Army majors were to get the same news this week. My husband escaped the reduction — this time. Many of my friends’ husbands and, by extension, my friends themselves, were not so lucky. After giving between seven and as many as 17 years of service, these officers and their families are being ordered to leave. Many of them don’t have a backup career plan. When they joined the Army they, like my husband and me, planned to stay 20 years or more.

They have watched buddies die, missed anniversaries, first steps and birthdays. And now, just like that, it is all over.

For the entirety of our Army service the enemy has been “over there,” far away in Afghanistan or Iraq. We grew comfortable with the danger of deployments, reassuring ourselves that in a down economy where factory-working or cubicle-dwelling civilian friends faced layoffs, we had job security. With a steady paycheck on the 1st and 15th of the month, military service felt safe compared to the nightmare of unemployment. But it doesn’t anymore.

Officer separations have been used throughout American history as a means of controlling the size of the force. Targeting cuts at certain commission-year groups is not new. When the military didn’t need you anymore, it let you go. It happened after World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Downsizing is a normal way for the military to recover from war.

But none of us were around then. We don’t care that it’s all been done before. For us it feels fresh, terrifying and even insulting. Force reductions feel very personal and, after all is said and done, rather arbitrary. When the cuts were announced, Army officials said that primarily those with poor evaluations or reprimands on their record would be targeted. But nothing ever works as seamlessly in real life as on paper. Those who “deserve it” are not the only ones who get fired.

“I just don’t understand why us,” my friend whose spouse was selected for the cuts told me. “There are so many others who are worse.”

After giving up her blooming career as a counselor to follow her husband to a new duty station, and spending at least 39 months without him during their relationship thanks to training and deployments, she doesn’t understand what more they could have done to deserve to stay.

There is one kind of survivor’s guilt when friends and neighbors are arbitrarily cut down by war. There is another kind when friends and neighbors are arbitrarily cut down by peace. When my friends’ husbands were killed or seriously injured downrange, I didn’t understand why we made it out unscathed. But now I feel a sense of survivor’s guilt that my spouse has a job while so many others soon won’t. Did they really escape death on the battlefield only to be a casualty of force reductions? And while my family is safe for now, this won’t be the only time the Army makes cuts. Over our heads hangs the cloud of “maybe we’re next.”

When a job is a way of life and your coworkers are your family, pink slips feel like betrayal. After years of combat deployments, training separations, child births while alone and cross-country moves, we have given so much in the service of our country. The military has become the closest family many of us have ever had. And now, just like that, some of us are orphans.
Amy Bushatz is an Army wife, mother and the managing editor of Military.com’s SpouseBuzz blog. You can follow her on Twitter at @amybushatz.

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At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

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